Namecoin

Namecoin is an experimental open-source technology which improves decentralization, security, censorship resistance, privacy, and speed of certain components of the Internet infrastructure such as DNS and identities.

(For the technically minded, Namecoin is a key/value pair registration and transfer system based on the Bitcoin technology.)

Proposed ideas such as file signatures, voting, bonds/stocks/shares, web of trust, notary services, and proof of existence. (To be implemented.)

What does Namecoin do under the hood?

Securely record and transfer arbitrary names (keys).

Attach a value (data) to the names (up to 520 bytes).

Transact the digital currency namecoins (NMC).

Like bitcoins, Namecoin names are difficult to censor or seize.

Lookups do not generate network traffic (improves privacy).

Namecoin was the first fork of Bitcoin and still is one of the most innovative “altcoins”. It was first to implement merged mining and a decentralized DNS. Namecoin was also the first solution to Zooko’s Triangle, the long-standing problem of producing a naming system that is simultaneously secure, decentralized, and human-meaningful.

2018-10-29 Namecoin’s Chief Scientist Daniel Kraft will be a speaker at Malta Blockchain Summit 2018, October 31 - November 3. Daniel is on the “Permissioned vs Permissionless Blockchains” panel at 9:30-9:50 on November 2.

2018-10-25 A few months ago I wrote about name script support in ElectrumX. Neil from ElectrumX has now merged that code into ElectrumX master branch. I’ve also notified the operator of the public ElectrumX Namecoin instance, so hopefully soon it will be possible to use Electrum-NMC’s name script support with the default public ElectrumX instance. Kudos to Neil for accepting the pull request!

2018-10-15 As I mentioned earlier, I submitted some patches to The Tor Project for building NSS certutil binaries for Windows and macOS as part of Tor Browser’s rbm build scripts. I’m happy to report that after a (quite well-justified) delay, and after some (quite reasonable) mild edits were requested and made, the Tor developers have merged my patches.